VanEck plots launch of Avalanche-focused PurposeBuilt fund
VanEck’s Pranav Kanade told Blockworks that it doesn’t plan to launch a similar fund for other ecosystems at this time
VanEck digital assets alpha fund portfolio manager Pranav Kanade | Ben Solomon Photo LLC for Blockworks, modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Empire newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
VanEck is planning to launch the VanEck PurposeBuilt fund next month, which will focus specifically on Avalanche.
The goal is to have a dedicated fund that can focus on projects building on Avalanche, and it’ll be managed by VanEck’s Digital Assets Alpha Fund.
I asked Pranav Kanade, portfolio manager for the Alpha fund, why the firm decided to focus on Avalanche: “Increasingly, the best builders want to own the full stack with minimal value leakage, and Avalanche’s L1 architecture makes that possible. The Avalanche team has also backed this with strong business development efforts that are delivering results,” he explained.
“At the same time, earlier-stage teams looking to test for product-market fit can launch on the C-Chain, which is competitive with the best high-throughput EVM chains. The Avalanche ecosystem offers solutions for builders across their entire lifecycle.”
The team doesn’t plan to launch any other funds with another ecosystem at the moment, Kanade added.
The fund will invest in liquid tokens and projects backed by venture capital, which could include a variety of sectors, including gaming, financial services, payments and AI.
It’ll aim to invest typically “around or after a Token Generation Event, with a fundamentals-first strategy focused on long-term outcomes.”
Any unused capital will be deployed onchain through real-world asset products on Avalanche, which could include tokenized money markets to ensure liquidity is maintained, a press release said.
As for how the fund itself came about, Kanade explained that the Avalanche team “liked our investment strategy.”
“We brainstormed a structure that would work well for both sides. Today’s best founders in the token space often face a ‘discovery’ problem — it’s easy to get drowned out by the speculative noise around memecoins and vaporware,” he added. “We wanted to support a more mature approach to capital allocation, and Avalanche shared that vision. With many of the strongest founders already building in Avalanche, this was a natural direction for us.”
The team isn’t confirming the size of the fund at this time. But the announcement overall is just yet another sign of the times, as we continue to see a trend of capital going towards builders who are focused on other opportunities outside of infrastructure.
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- The Breakdown: Decoding crypto and the markets. Daily.
- Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
- Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
- Lightspeed: All things Solana.
- The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.
